


things could be stranger (but I don't know how)

by SlenderLoris



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Friendship, Gardens & Gardening, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-14
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-03-31 03:24:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13966323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SlenderLoris/pseuds/SlenderLoris
Summary: Rose Tico is building a hydroponic garden and trying to honor her sister's memory.  Meanwhile, there's a disturbance in the Force.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> title from "Changes" by Langhorn Slim

On Hays Minor, it was tradition to give gifts on the occasion of one’s death.

Traditionally, it would be something the whole community could enjoy.  Most of the time the family would put on a feast for the whole colony.  People would talk about it for months after. Platters of grilled and caramelized vegetables, alternating platters of sliced roots soaked in a sweet and smoky marinade and bitter greens tossed with vinegar.  Baskets of sweet rolls, alternating glazed and fruit studded, some dusted with powdered sugar.    Foamed drinks for everyone – warm frothed milk for the kids, sticking to their upper lip as they pretended to be old grandfathers, and bubbly cider for the adults.  The main even at each table was a squat cauldron of soup, and every table had a different one.  Rose barely remembered her grandmother, but her grandmother’s Gift was one of her first memories.   She remembered Paige running to each tables and back with something special from each,  her mother helping her hold a cup of frothy milk and licking the rim of the cup, and finally being sticky and full after eating more sweet rolls than she had seen in her entire life as she fell asleep in her mothers arms. 

When her mother died though, they didn’t have enough money to pay for a feast.  And even if they had, Paige said, there was barely any sugar to buy in the colony since the last round of restrictions.

What the colony did have though, was broken bay doors.  The main doors separating the mines’ pumping mechanism from the surface had locked sometime early that summer, when they had ground open to relieve some of the oppressive heat in the mine and had refused to close again. It wasn’t an urgent problem – its not like anyone in the colony would try to steal machinery they knew they couldn’t sell, and there was no one left stupid or brave enough to try to sabotage the First Order on Hays Minor and Stormtroopers were posted at night by the entrance either way, so it had been left alone.  But it meant that the noise of the mines was a constant, inescapable presence in the town.  So, the morning after their mother’s death Paige, holding Rose’s hand, went to the empty town hall, and found the schematics for the door on a dusty sheet of flimsi.  Then she went home and dug out a rolled up toolbelt that had belonged to their grandmother, and a pair of gloves made of thick, cracked leather that had been their grandfathers.   Then she went down to the bay doors and sat Rose on the steps near them with a book and a snack and instructions to stay there and be quiet. 

Then she fixed the bay doors.

Watching her sister laboring over the door mechanism was probably the most formative moment of Rose’s life. Paige wasn’t a bad mechanic, but she wasn’t a good one either, and she spent that day cursing more and more the deeper she got into the engines.  When she finally fixed the jammed gear that was keeping them open it was late in the afternoon, and the doors almost caught one of the miners on his way out.

After that, the town was marginally quieter, and everyone called the bay doors Claire’s Doors, to thank Rose and Paige’s mother for the Gift.

There isn’t time to arrange a feast or fix anything non-essential during the flight from D’Qar, and after that Rose is very, very busy.  She looks for an opportunity, but nothing feels right.  She briefly wonders if she can count freeing the faters, but after she survives Cano Blight, and Captain Phasma, and Crait, she figures she has time to do something better. Something more long lasting.

On Bandomeer, there isn’t enough food for Rose to throw a feast. And even though most of the base is broken in some way or another, fixing it’s her job now, so she can’t make that Paige’s Gift.

She doesn’t know what she is going to do for weeks.  It’s a shameful amount of time to wait, really, but she’s constantly busy, and can barely thing in the blur that is eating, sleeping, and fixing the decrepit Rebel base that now hosts the Resistance.

The Resistance might be short on people now, but it has an oversupply of everything else, particularly in this abandoned Rebel Base, which had apparently been a storage deposit at one point.  It’s a novelty for Rose – she’s never had this much access to tools or materials, and it makes fixing up the base one of the easiest jobs she’s ever had logistically, if physically exhausting.  Going through the store rooms is like a treasure hunt – there are spares for more of the X-Wing parts, rows of droid chassis lying empty, neatly stacked boxes of blaster repair kits. It’s all a little overwhelming. Poking around, Rose finds whole storerooms filled with plasti pipe and different sizes of wire, not to mention the dozens of cavernous sublevels that are just empty. 

When she asks if she can take some of the pipe for a project, and maybe also use some of that empty space, and also access one of the minor water lines, she is fully prepared to be turned down.  She has a much more reasonable request form already filled out to come back with. Commander Poe just nods, though, and tells her to let him know if she needs anything else.

So Rose goes down to her new storeroom to build a garden for Paige.


	2. Chapter 2

Rose brings Finn down to the garden because she has had an absolutely shit day.

She _has._ She woke up feeling gross and crabby and had the bitterest, most burnt cup of caff she’s ever had the pleasure of burning her tongue on before spending literally the entire day running around patching tarmac because they just heard they _might_ be getting a supply boat from cloud city and if the tarmac wasn’t fixed in time, _it could literally sink into the ground and get stuck._ Which is ridiculous.  And she spent the entire time feeling anxious and sick to her stomach, because this had to get done _now_ and she _gets_ that, but she was supposed to have today to work on the dormitory generator, which is working fine right now but has also been making a weird uneven whining sound and is probably going to die sometime in the next two weeks if she doesn’t figure out what’s wrong with it, but taking apart the generator and fixing is has been shaping up to be an all day job since she realized its not just a model T7 – it’s a bastardized T7.5 and so its going to be even bitchier to put back together and she doesn’t have _time_. And when she complained to Sergeant L’gan he had just told her not to worry about it like that was completely reasonable, so she spent the entire day rushing between trying to patch tarmac cracks, which was simultaneously nerve wracking and intensely boring, and trying to figure out what spare parts she could sub into the generator while she waited for the tarmac to dry, which was incredibly detail oriented and not really a suitable task to do in a bunch of five minute intervals while scarfing down a sandwich, but that’s where they were today apparently.

Anyway.  Its been a shit day.

So when Finn puts down his tray next to hers in the cafeteria where she is trying not to cry into her stewed grava berries and not really succeeding, she accepts his presence as the gift from the Force that it is lets herself bask in his presence.  Finn is simply the _best_.  He’s trying so hard to seem casual about sitting next to her that its almost funny, except its not when he totally drops the carefully cultivated air of indifference the second he sees her face.

“Hey, hey,” he says, dropping into the seat next to her sideways so his whole body is turned toward her. “What’s wrong?”

“I-“ the second she opens her mouth she’s crying even harder. “I don’t know.  Its just been a really horrible day okay?”

“Okay, okay.” Finn says soothingly.  He reaches out with the side of thumb to brush her tears away – Finn has absolutely no concept of personal space and she thinks it’s a Stormtrooper thing, but right now its exactly what she needs.

“Can I –“ she starts, reaching out.

Finn immediately pulls her into a hug.

Finn hugs the way Paige used to – with his whole body, totally wrapping you up in his arms, but gently. She cries into his shoulder a little, overwhelmed and sad and embarrassed, and he just rubs circles on her shoulder and pulls her closer, murmuring some soothing nonsense.

“I’m okay,” she says after a minute, pulling away in between the little crying gaps she’s making that she absolutely _hates._ “I’m fine.”

“Okay.” Says Finn, not taking his hand off her shoulder. 

“Its just,” she starts, and feels her eyes well up again.  She _hates_ herself. “I’m just a little overwhelmed I think.”

“Okay,” he says again, all steady and concerned. “Why don’t we go somewhere a little quieter, okay?  Would that help?”

“Ah,” that does sound good. “But I haven’t finished dinner.”

“We’ll take it with us,” he says, reaching out and grabbing her tray.  “And if someone tries to get you in trouble for it, I’ll say Poe needed us and told you to bring dinner.”

“Okay.” She says, a little lightheaded and still kind of crying.  She doesn’t want to get him in trouble, but she really doesn’t want to keep crying in the cafeteria where everyone can see her. “Yeah, lets go.”

Finn carries her tray with one hand and gently steers her out of the cafeteria with the other, nodding people who try to talk to him away and generally keeping her grounded.  She is, she thinks, incredibly lucky to have a friend like him.

“So where do you want to go?” He asks, once they’re out of the cafeteria. 

And well, technically she’s supposed to keep Paige’s Gift away from the community until its done, but its Finn.  And he might be the closest thing she has to family left.

So she takes him down to the empty storeroom where she is building a garden.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I finally think I'm really starting to get Rose's voice! And Finn is such a lovely character to write.


	3. Chapter 3

The garden is coming along…well. Surprisingly well. 

Rose isn’t sure she can technically call it a garden yet, because there aren’t any plants, or even any dirt. Admittedly, even when its done, it won’t really have dirt, because it’s a hydroponic garden, but it does make the etymology for the garden-in-progress a little fuzzy. It sure doesn’t feel like the plot of land her mom grew dahlias and carrots in. But she’s got the frame set up, and its starting to look like something.

She survey’s her work with no small pride. She’d set up the reservoir first, and she decided to make set it into the floor itself – she used some of the concrete they’d whipped up to fix the tarmac, and had built up the hallway out side the storeroom she was using by almost a foot, so she had been able to line the room’s original dimensions with plasti. Then she had built up a frame work for the new ‘floor’ – a series of walkways.

She’d originally thought of the walkways as a nice neat grid over the water, but while she was cutting out the guardrails from sheets of plasti, she remembered the stories her mother had told her and Paige when they were little. They were the best stories – full of force spirits and Jedi and brave little girls. 

(Rose had never really known if her mother had made them up or not – Paige had always scoffed in mock affront when she asked, and it wasn’t like there was anyone from home she could ask now.)

In those stories, sometimes the brave little girls would have to fight a Sith spirit trying to infect their hearts. In Rose’s favorite, the one she asked for over and over again, the little girl had saved her family by tricking the Sith spirit to follow her across a lake over a series of rafts tied together to form a bridge. When the two of them reached the island in the middle of the lake, the girl had distracted the Sith spirit and then run away, back over the bridges, striking each one with her heel as she crossed it, sending it spinning until the straight path was a mess of zigzagging rafts. The Sith spirit raged, because it could only walk in straight lines. It was trapped on the island. And the little girl went back to her family, who welcomed her with opened arms, their hearts freed from the Sith’s rage. 

Paige had loved that story too, and after they left home, she would tell it to Rose sometimes, when she asked.

Looking back over her plans, Rose figured it wouldn’t be too hard to make the pathways zigzagged. She wouldn’t have to cut that many new guardrails. 

So now the garden had zigzagging paths set over a foot of tranquil water. Or, what would be water, but was currently still empty space.

“Can I have the piping please?” she asked, still debating if she had the right placement for this air stone. She wanted them to all be equidistant between the walkways.

“Here you go.” Finn said, reaching down to pass it to her from the walkway. It was kind of weird to have him so much taller than her. It was also frustrating to find out he apparently didn’t have a bad angle. 

“Thank you.” She said distractedly. “Do you think this will look okay?”

“Definitely,” he said. “Its all very symmetrical in a really diamond-y way.”

“You think?” she said, hopping up onto the walkway to survey her domain. From the doorway on the far end, two zigzagging paths branched out, each hitting the opposite wall and then reuniting at this end of the room, forming a large diamond. Those were the main paths, big enough for two people to walk shoulder to shoulder, but she’d also put in slightly lower, narrower paths, more for maintenance than anything, along the edges of the room and bisecting it both ways. Over all, it looked like square dissected into four, with a diamond inside it. 

“It’s not too busy?” she asked, starting to worry. She’d always been partial to more complicated designs but – 

“It looks great.” Finn said firmly. “Everyone will love it.”

“Thank you,” she said, feeling her cheeks starting to heat up. She just wanted to everyone to love it.

They stood there, admiring the skeleton of the garden, when suddenly there was a large bang.

Both of them jumped, and Rose immediately tried to put Finn behind her, while he tried put out his arm in an attempt to protect her. 

The plasti pipes they had stacked in the corner, had collapsed. 

“What in the Force-,“ Rose started, immediately going over to investigate. She had tied the pipes together and secured the stacks last night! She carefully stepped over the lose pipes to get to the pallets she had secured them too. Weirdly, the ties she had used looked pulled out and old, not new like they had been yesterday. Looking like that, she could believe they snapped. But they had seemed fine last night.

“Well that’s strange.” She said. 

“What happened?” Finn asked, still surveying the room warily. 

“It looks like a tie snapped.” She said. “But they were new, and the way it broke looks like it had been straining against weight.” Or…

“Or?” prompted Finn. He’d gotten very good at knowing what she was thinking.

“Or like someone was pulling on them.” She said. “That’s the other way to get them looking so stretched out like that, and to make them snap.”

“You think someone-“

“No!” She said quickly. “Why would they, even if anyone knew this was here? It’s not like there is a shortage of plasti pipe on base. Or like they couldn’t have just cut the ties if they wanted. That’s why it’s weird.”

“Huh” He said.

“Yeah.” She said. She hesitated for a minute, looking at the mess. “Well, it won’t clean itself up on its own.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the thing about demons and zigzags is a real things from Japanese folklore, and the reason many Japanese or Japanese inspired gardens have zigzag paths! It was a favorite feature of a garden I used to work at, so I figured I would incorporate it.


End file.
